Stephen Hunter

Derived from the folksy, avuncular works of Jean Shepherd, it's a movie in search of a story, characters and a reason to exist. In this quest, it goes 0 for 3. It's like watching Jell-O harden, then melt, only not quite so much fun. [23 Sep 1994]

It never makes much sense.

Payne is a comic miniaturist, who works in a small compass, as if through a magnifying glass with tweezers.

What a bummer! Certainly the meanest-spirited film ever associated with the Disney hallmark.

It all adds up to something less powerful and interesting than the original.

It's a brilliant movie, fluent, spectacular, breathtaking and basically, uh, wrong.

It's shallow as a puddle, but lots o' fun.

These are great, primal stories that pull you in, make you care and put you on the edge of madness and violence.

A devastatingly dishonest, tough look at teenage life.

So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?

Mamet loves two things: scams and dialogue. This movie is rich with both.

Only in its final minutes does it somewhat squander its grip on the moral imagination, in a climax that seems oddly to undercut all that's come before and return us to the hallowed sense of violence as cleansing which so animates the world's true killers.

The effects are murky and the giant worm looks more like a smear on the lens than anything else. Most of the intensity is generated by sudden sound effects like ringing phones, alarm clocks or oven timers.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

It's so spoofy it's difficult to call 'good' or even 'bad'; just say it's smooth.

Ghastly yet wonderful at the same time.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

A few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed.

It's sickeningly violent!

He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

The secret reptile part of you yearns to see Berenger's laconic Shale enforce classroom discipline with his Uzi and back up the no-talking rule with a Claymore mine. But no. Rather, Shale tumbles quickly enough to the fact that more than routine violence is afflicting the school, that there is, in fact, a conspiracy.

You may not enjoy The Mother (I certainly didn't), but it's a movie so heavy on truth, its spell cannot be denied.

If nothing else it's a wonderful essay on the meaning of freedom and the courage it takes to wrestle it from despots. In that sense, it feels more political and cultural than religious.

The sad truth is that Wonder Boys is little more than a sentimentalized encomium to the disheveled, childish life it ascribes to writers.

A superior adaptation that bypasses the Ann Reinking version now on Broadway.

The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely.

Ultimately, The Guardian veers off into slobbery touchy-feeliness, and the tone becomes mock-religious, almost liturgical.

It's hard to hate, because as a rabble-rouser it is superbly effective, driven forward by two powerhouse actors.